So you want to motorcycle the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, NWT? If you we’re smart you’d wait for a couple of nice dry days, but we never claimed to be smart. We head out onto the fabled road in the rain to experience its worst as we ride beyond the Arctic Circle…
Category: Canada
Stark Places – The Dempster Highway
By the term “highway”, don’t confuse the Dempster with the paved varicosities that strangle our modern world. A product of its environment this is a filament of the south sent out like an infection, and the land does its best to fight it off.
Challenges
On a good day the road from Dease Lake to Telegraph Creek, BC is an ethereal dirt cavort through scenery composed of precipitous canyons sheered into lava by erosive rivers. Add one night of rain and it goes from being one the world’s greatest driveways to one of the most terrifying.
Off Course
We’re off course, and we don’t need a map or GPS to tell us so. We’re headed south-west rather than north-west thanks to a wrong turn off of the Blackwater Forest Service Road and onto Batnuni, above the sky is darkening and the sun diminished to a glowing red-orange ember. Below me the BMW F800GS…
Departures
With a personal riding history is littered with a disturbing pattern of rough departures, the OWD team heads north for the Arctic Circle, after a very slow start.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – A Parting of Ways
Clear, the morning starts at freezing and is slow to warm, as I ride into the jagged boundary between Alberta and British Columbia. The ying to Newfoundland’s aged, rounded and spare yang, the Rockies complete Canada’s parenthesis of spectacle. Climbing the 93 into gray skies we reach Continental divide, the split of North America’s lopsided…
Irrational Adoration: Best Western and Harley-Davidson Press Tour
I throw the Harley-Davidson Sportster Nightster into the corner, hard and fast enough that it wobbles on Quebec’s pavement chop. This will pass, but sometimes a little active intervention helps – we throttle on out of the apex to a scrape of the peg. A long straight and the little Sportster’s needle brushes 160kph, this Harley-Davidson/Best Western press tour hasn’t been going to plan, but thundering down the straight and setting up for the next corner I can’t help but crack a smile.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Alberta
It’s the West, home’s backyard, and Alberta feels like an old friend. The border between provinces continues to be startlingly accurate. Behind me is the wide sky and roll of the prairies, ahead the dinosaurs, oil and ranches, the Rockies, British Columbia and finally home.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding Forget
The sign for Saskatchewan is a harbinger of prosperity. Pump-jacks line the roadside fellating like 50’s cartoon mosquitoes pulling congealed crude from the earth. David & David’s “Welcome to Boomtown” drifts through my mind. If there is a place to let your mind roam while riding, this is it, a wide openness painted in blue…
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Holland… Manitoba
Pickups charge down side-roads towards the highway, plumes of silica fog hanging in their wake. They are driven with the impunity of those who know they will never come across an unexpected corner. Those drivers are right. Welcome to the prairies.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding the North Star
My original plan was to push through Winnipeg, but my blind servitude to the Garmin Zumo GPS carries me into the downtown core. Then architecture grabbed me, the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank, the Via Rail station. A rail hub and the former central point of the fur trade Winnipeg has maintained a sense…
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Jennifer and Joezs Dream
Just for reference, Ontario is large enough that when the provincial government decided to protect 222,000 square kilometers (56 million acres) of boreal forest from development in July of 2008, comparisons were drawn. For example, 222,000 square kilometers is equal to the entirety of the U.S.’s road-less areas, half the size of Texas, or the…
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